Party Time at the Bank

Some time ago I used know someone who knew someone who worked in a bank. For some reason we were chatting one evening and the conversation got around to "What would you do if someone came in and said 'I've got a gun, give me all your money'?"

Apparently the bank had a special code phrase which was to be used in this situation. The drill was to ask the cashier at the next position "What time is Andy's party?". Apparently the appropriate action involving silent alarms, marked notes and giant falling cages (or whatever) could then be taken.

This has bugged me for years. Viewed from the perspective of the robber this would be highly confusing. I'm presenting the person in front of me with the business end of a firearm, demanding money with menaces and the first thing they do is sort out a few social engagements before getting on with doling out  the cash. At very least this would make me inclined to increase their motivation a bit, perhaps by shooting up the place. Bonkers.

I've since figured out that the code phrase has now been changed slightly. Now, they way that they signal miscreants is by not offering them life insurance, a new mortgage or a car loan as they hand the money over....

Early but not bright

Went into Hull at 7:00 am this morning. Not because of some confusion updating the clocks (that was weeks ago) but to review the papers for BBC Radio Humberside. I've been doing this for a while, and I usually take the camera in case any nice photo opportunities arise.

Early Hull looking good

I managed to muddle my way through the reviews OK (note to self, you seem to run a bit slow on Mondays - go for other days of the week in future) and with a bit of luck they'll ask me back so I can get up early all over again.

Cortina Nostalgia

Ours was maroon

When I was very young (and probably even more impressionable than I am now) my dad bought a Mark 1 Cortina. At the time this was the epitome of style and taste. Nowadays it would be regarded as somewhat primitive. I mean, the dashboard (not the fascia) only had four buttons on it. And nearest thing we had to airbags was an empty crisp packet in the "glove compartment". Which curiously never seemed to have any gloves in it. Ever.

I was reminded of this chunk of my personal history yesterday as I was standing in W H Smiths reading magazines for free. There is one called "Classic Ford" or somesuch, which had numerous pictures of the MK1 Cortina Owner's national rally. They even have their own web site. What memories.

Sequence of Stupidity

• October 10th Robert given receipt for hotel booking on Robert's credit card with instructions to "keep it safe so you can use it to claim back the money later".
• Robert tosses the receipt onto desk on top of huge pile of papers.
• Receipt stays safe for a couple of weeks or so, drifting around the office.
• Robert notices the receipt just lying around and decides to address the problem by placing the receipt "somewhere safe".
• Receipt vanishes.

There's probably a moral to all this, but I'm darned if I know what it is...

Update on 2006-11-15 20:19 by Rob

Ha. Found it. The document had got itself folded up with something else and I've now carefully copied the numbers onto an expenses claim form.....

Going for a drive

After all the excitement of foreign travel and dodgy planes today we just settled for a litle drive to Durham and back to visit number one son.

On the way there we saw some amazing rainbows, including one which went all the way over the motorway. I'd love to have taken some pictures, but I was driving at the time, which is a bit sad.

When we got to Durham it rained. A lot. And then some more. Number one son showed his local knowledge by getting us lost down an alley on the way to the indoor market. With the torrents of rain, poor lighting and overflowing rubbish bins the place looked like the opening shot from a CSI episode. But fortunately there were no bodies to be found.

After a splendid time talking about nothing in particular and looking at large tellies (an AV upgrade is in the pipeline) we tootled back to warm Hull.

Danger at 300 feet

Well, I'm back home now. The conference was great fun. You can see a video of me here.

The trip back was slightly enlivened by the landing process, which seemed to involve a bit more going up than I remembered from previous flights. Then the captain came on and said that a warning light had come on concerning the undercarriage as we were making our final approach. However, not to worry because he had done the aeronautical equivalent of bashing the dashboard of the plane and things were fine now...

Although it was a bit disconcerting to find all the fire engines lined up alongside the runway when we finally touched down...

TechEd Update

Yesterday and today have been a bit of a blur. I've been to more sessions. Marvelled at the .NET Micro Framework, revelled in the Robotics stuff and been very impressed with the RSS feed talk this morning. I've found time to take a few more pictures too, which is always nice.

Rather a good sunrise

Even got the moon in this one

The Expo centre

The exhibition floor

MSP's from around the world.

If you have met me you will understand the humour in this picture.

There are some more on Flickr.

Tomorrow I give my session. Wish me luck.

Darned Efficiency

It seems that the time synchronisation betweeen diary and time zones has just about been sorted out. I know this because I set my alarm an hour early on my PDA to allow for the fact that I am in a different time zone, set my PDA to the correct time zone and then got my wake up call an hour early.

Drat.

TechEd 2007 Gets Going

Went to the keynote for TechEd 2007 today.  I've been to a few of these and so I thought I knew what to expect. What I didn't expect to see was the Imagine Cup coming down the tracks as the first headline item.

Bigging up the IC

Interesting in that three and a half years ago I went to the first imagine Cup world final and there were 14 teams who had a bunch of booths off to one side of the main exhibition. Today we have the IC as a keynote item and teams from pretty much every country in the world taking part and a big stand in the middle of the exhibition area. If you are at TechEd go and see Caroline on the stand. Tell her Rob sent you.... This is all such good stuff. Nice to see that Microsoft is still keen on getting students fired up in this business. They also introduced a lass from Pakistan who, at the tender age of 10 managed to get some C# qualifications. Very impressive. I thought back nervously to my 11 year old self, I think I was writing joined up by then.....

Then it was on to the computer stuff. They showed a thing where you can view  business processes via Sharepoint 2007 and actually modify their actions directly using C#. Very clever.  Business process is a big, big, thing. And the ability to do this kind of thing is terribly interesting. I'm pondering about the potential of regarding academic progression as a process like this. Might be a fun student project. 

Then we went on to using Ajax to seriously spice up the user interface, which was very pretty. They had a bit whre you could select swatches for clothing and then view the outfits that would be made from the. this was kind of impressive, but what I really wanted was a tool which would do full cloth modelling (like some of our students are doing for games) and then put them onto representations of real people. I guess it will come with time. And I'm pretty sure the platform would support it.

Finally it was the seriously techie stuff. Using the new Linq extensions you can connect databases directly to your software objects with just about no glue. This is hugely significant. One of the nasty problems at the moment is how you can take your nice shiny objects and connect them to your big fat database. It looks like Linq will  pretty much nail this issue. And it has some lovely RSS tools too.

And now I'm off for lunch....

Barcelona by bus and foot

Done a lot of walking today. And a lot of top deck bus riding. After we had signed in at the conference centre we went on a tour of the city by open top bus. We took in the cathedral, which is the most impressive building site that I've ever seen, and Guadi park, which was very nice. Also a whole bunch of other, highly interesting, places which are all shut on a Monday. I've put a bunch of pictures up on Flickr. No doubt I'll take more.

Cathedral spires

Tomorrow the work starts for real.

Flying Out in Style

Flew out the Barcelona today. Jet 2 gave me the one seat on the plane with uber legroom. Very comfortable. Because I am a speaker at TechEd I was met by a very smart chap in a suit with a shiny Mercedes to take me to my hotel. Which was great. The hotel is posh too. It even has WIFI, although this did seem a bit dodgy, so I only managed to see around twenty seconds of Torchwood. Never mind.

Can you?

Just sent John the answer to this puzzle. I managed to solve it. Can you?

Customer Impressions

I love my job. Today has been uber busy. Updating the XNA presentation, giving a couple of lectures, attending a mid-semester review meeting with the second year (we had loads of students turn up - and some really good discussion about how we do what we do).

And acting as a customer in our Software Engineering project. At first I was not looking forward to this. We usually try to get people to do this who the students doing the work are not familiar with. I've been giving lectures to this group for a while, and in this respect I'm quite well known.

But for the project I have to be "just a customer". But actually it is quite fun. Some of the people who have come to see me have asked jaw droppingly sensible questions that I would not have thought of asking if I was doing the job, which is great. And I quite like being unhelpful and uncommunicative for a change. At least, I think it is a change......

Only Human

I've been fretting about all the typos that students keep finding in my Orange C# Book (remember, you can get your own personal copy here folks). At the same time I've been reading the Charles Petzold book "Applications = Code+Markup". And this has cheered me up a bit.

Hull Culture

If you live in Hull, and haven't been to Ferens Art Gallery, then shame on you. It is free to get in, they have a nice coffee shop and there are some stunning paintings in there. At the moment they have a special exhibition called "Darkness Visible" which is easily the equal of ones that I've seen at Tate Modern (that is to say that I didn't understand some of these exhibits either).

But that doesn't mean that I won't be going back. It really is a nice place. Right in the middle of town it is an oasis of peace and quiet and paintings and sculptures and installations.

I try to make a point of going into art galleries when I go places. Not because I am particularly artistic (obviously) but because it gives you a nice insight into the local area. Hull has some splendid galleries and museums and can really hold its head up with pride in this respect.

Students, a good place to take your parents if they insist on you showing them the neighbourhood. You can leave them with the impression that you are acquiring culture, which is always a good thing.

Prada and Profundity

Since that horrible Horizon program on Wednesday about artificial intelligence I've been pondering on what is really going to happen in the future, when megabrain computers are loaded with the minds of our greatest scientists.

Now, I don't know much about this stuff, but it seems to me that us ignorant humans have managed to prove that:

• some things you just can't predict (Quantum Theory)
• some things you have to take on trust (Godel)

In other words, no matter how clever you are there is a limit to the number of things you can work out using pure brain power.

Which means that our super intelligent machines are going to be in a bit of a fix because they won't be able draw any conclusions at the end of all this wonderful thought they will be doing.

And then it came to me; they will do what us humans do when we have nothing better to do. They will dabble in things like fashion.

Scene : Singularity Sixty Seven - outpost seventy three of hive mind five

Consciousness Alpha Four: "..then I said to him that recurring decimals were so last season and that all the really serious fraction action this year has got to be down with the vulgar's..."
Consciousness Beta One: "You are so right. Do you think my brain looks big in this?"

Working for the Borg

Just received a note about the Pay Modernisation framework the university is putting into place. One of the headings is "Assimilation Panels". Just what I suspected....

Madness I tell you

If you go to the MSN home page at the moment you can see an advert for satnav for a Buick car. The tagline for Buick would seem to be "Beyond Precision".

What rubbish. How can you be more precise than precise? This sort of advertising really annoys me.  I really dislike it when people mess up with English. How on earth did they get to this?

Scene : Advertising Agency

Drone 1: "They say that this satnav is precise."
Drone 2: "And precise is good, right?"
Drone 1: "..and so more than precise would be even better?"
Drone 2:"I've always liked 'beyond'....."
Drone 1:"So, 'Beyond Precision' it is then. Send them a bill for fifty thousand as usual."

shudder

Useful Hull Web Sites

My mate Geoff has made a couple of very useful web sites for people who live in Hull. One gives you a list of what is on at the local Cineworld and the other the weather forecast. They both go onto web sites to scrape the data and then present a page just right for viewing on a mobile device:

http://www.geoff.org.uk/cinema.php

http://www.geoff.org.uk/weather.php

Worth adding to your mobile favourites.

When someone rings me a penguin dances

One of my students very kindly sent me a Firebox.com voucher after I helped her debug her program (not sure how this figures in the scheme of things bribery + corruption wise, but since the voucher has a cash redemption value of 0.001 pence I don't think I necessarily have to inform the authorities).

Anyhoo, it was off down to the Firebox web site to see what goodies they had in store. I got the latest version of 20Q - which is even more impressive than the original - and a bunch of mopods for me and the ladies in my family (they won't work for number one son 'cos he is on 3G - but you can't have everything). Actually, the voucher only covered a small part of the total price - but since I was saving money I was quite happy about this....

Mopods are fun. They are a little figure in a tiny glass jar and when your phone rings they dance. I got the penguin one which is quite neat. In the unlikely event of someone ringing me up (although it did happen in a lecture today....) he spins on the spot and lights flash. For a fiver they are quite good value.  Actually, I get quite a bit of dance action because he also detects when my phone connects to ActiveSync email and does a little dance then too.